


Among Les Amis

by nxrcissa



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: ? - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Among Us, Crack, Gen, Grantaire is Corpse Husband, It's an article, Social Media, YouTube, a profile that feuilly the journalist writes about taire, and before u ask yes i do simp for corpse, bear with me, idk this is a fucking weird premise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:21:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27745897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nxrcissa/pseuds/nxrcissa
Summary: R is undeniably charismatic, and he tells me it’s exhausting.“Don’t tell anyone I said that,” he jokes, “I have a reputation to maintain, you know.”If you haven’t heard of RTIST before, let me catch you up.In 2011, a man known only as R created a YouTube channel called RTIST. He was in university at the time, pursuing a double major in fine arts and classics, but he dropped out mid-2014 to dedicate himself to YouTube full time. Now, he’s certified famous, and nobody even knows his name.I ask if his sister knows what he does for a living. He says she thinks he’s a drug dealer. I can’t tell if he’s joking.[this is an AU where Grantaire is the equivalent of Corpse LMAO i am so stupid]
Kudos: 5





	Among Les Amis

**Author's Note:**

> i don't know what this is either  
> what am i doing

_ November 16 2020 _

_ Republique is a small publication that publishes bimonthly, online and in limited print copies. _

**THE HOME OF RTISTRY**

Meet the faceless YouTuber everyone’s obsessed with 

By S. Feuilly

It’s a beautiful afternoon in Southern California, and all the curtains in RTIST’s apartment are drawn. He was filming just before I came, and he needs to make sure nobody can figure out where or who he is by looking out his windows. Explaining this to me, he laughs that he’s pale as an occupational hazard, but I can’t reveal whether or not that’s true.

In all my years of writing profiles and interviewing everyone from politicians to revolutionaries, it’s an online personality for whom I keep the most secrets. He tells me I’m the only person who’s both been to his place and knows what he does. Fans know he has brown hair, and that he’s tall. I can’t tell you any more about what he looks like, but I can talk about his personality. R, simply put, is magnetic. He casually digresses into sophisticated, poetic rants in a deep, rich baritone that hits the ear like dark chocolate (this is important). He smiles in a cheeky, knowing sort of way that makes you feel singular - like there’s layers of inside jokes and references between you instead of five minutes over the phone and a handful of emails. I find myself wanting to know all the jokes we haven’t shared yet, and he makes it easy. Conversation flows like water from the second we meet. I get the feeling that if his life had gone a little differently, he’d be getting a profile in GQ instead of  _ Republique _ . As it stands, there’s something small and melancholy in the way he exists in silences. 

R is undeniably charismatic, and he tells me it’s exhausting. 

“Don’t tell anyone I said that,” he jokes, “I have a reputation to maintain, you know.”

If you haven’t heard of RTIST before, let me catch you up. 

In 2011, a man known only as R created a YouTube channel called RTIST. He was in university at the time, pursuing a double major in fine arts and classics, but he dropped out mid-2014 to dedicate himself to YouTube full time. 

“Well, I say that, but actually it was because I have a lot of f*cking issues,” he comments flippantly. R suffers from anxiety and depression, and he’s a recovering alcoholic. 

“I dropped out because I had to get my stomach pumped twice. My sister staged an intervention. I went to rehab. Doing YouTube full time was just what I decided to do once I got out, because I love making bad choices.” 

It seems like a pretty good choice now. R has over 5 million subscribers on YouTube. I ask him to tweet nothing but a smiley face, and he gets over two hundred thousand likes with minutes. He’s certified famous, and nobody even knows his name. 

I ask if his sister knows what he does for a living. He says she thinks he’s a drug dealer. I can’t tell if he’s joking. 

RTIST started with long, rambling videos about philosophy, art and literature. They weren’t very popular in 2011, at a time when the top creators were endearingly campy sketch comics and over-the-top let’s play style gamers, and creators weren’t yet aiming for the 10 minute mark. 

“What I should’ve been doing was a podcast,” he says, “but I liked doing the painting thing.” 

According to R, the painting thing is what kept people coming back. I mentioned before that nobody knows what R look like - that’s because instead of filming himself while he talks, he films his hands as they paint. Over the years, his talents with a brush, charming personality, and razor sharp wit garnered him over 800,000 subscribers by 2019, but it wasn’t until this year during the pandemic that he really blew up. 

R shows me around. His apartment is modest, but full of personality. He tells me a fairly mundane story about this dinosaur-shaped landline he picked up at a flea market, but he tells it in such a way that I’m too absorbed to remember to ask any questions. Every wall is covered in art, from movie posters to caricatures he bought from street artists. He points to one with a man kissing a frog and asks me to guess who it is. (It’s Alex Jones.) 

He makes us both tea. I learn he loves Egon Schiele. We argue about politics. R seems to swing wildly between libertarian, communist and anarchist simply to be contrary, and it’s both infuriating and stimulating. 

The studio is the only place in the apartment where natural light is coming in, and that’s because there’s a sky light. I ask why he shuts all the curtains elsewhere if he only films in the studio. The answer - paranoia. 

“Why is it so important I keep myself a secret? Psyche would have killed Eros, had she lit the candle and seen a serpent.”

Since his rise to fame, R has been bombarded with requests for a face reveal. Fans constantly speculate about his appearance based on the sound of his voice, and that’s certainly a lot to live up to. Anyone associated with him is interrogated endlessly for details. He shows me a twitter thread attempting to figure out the first initial of his surname from offhand comments in videos spanning years of content. R feels that keeping his identity secret is a rare act of self-preservation. 

“Everyone assumes it will happen eventually, the unveiling, the big reveal. I think about doing it every single day, but I decide every single day to stay anonymous. Names have power. It’s impossible to see into the fog; If I ever give that power to the world, I have to be sure I’m strong enough to plant myself when I lose sight. I don’t know. Maybe it will die with you, Feuilly.”

I ask if the demands for a face reveal make him uncomfortable, or if he’s flattered, and he says it’s a little of both.

“There is something unsettling about the fact that a different image of me exists in millions of people’s minds - I am an amalgamation of your favourite celebrity, your high school crush, your best friend, your brother, a protagonist from your favourite book, somewhere between who I am, who I appear to be and who you want me to be. Of all those millions of men who could be me, outside of your mind I could not measure up to even one of them. It’s more than flattering that people care, though, it’s far beyond that. I’d be dead if they didn’t. I mean that. If I wasn’t here, I’d be dead.”

“A part of me is afraid of that, too. Like I’m the wizard of Oz. Pull back the curtain and it’s just a boring little man with a talent for fraud. Without the mystery, there’s nothing drawing people back. I’ve seen how quickly the rise and fall comes on internet time, and I know exactly what will happen to me if I fade back into obscurity. I’m a dead man walking.”

What about the people who already know who he is? Does he think they’ve been disappointed? 

“Feuilly, angel,” he laughs, “You are one of four people who have seen my face and know my name.”

The others are other content creators - Lègle de Meaux (Bossuet), Étienne Joly (drjollly) and another faceless YouTuber who goes by Musichetta. I feel like I’ve joined some sort of secret society, and I tell him so. He tells me the pointy white hat will come in the mail. 

“Don’t get too comfortable. The club could be expanding sometime soon. My hands are shaking just thinking about it, but I think I’d like to meet  _ Les Amis _ , or at least a few of them. They have been the best thing about this whole experience, so welcoming and supportive. I didn’t have anyone for years, then I had three friends, and now I have this whole network.”

_ Les Amis _ is a well-known content house whose members produce content in every genre you could think of. During quarantine this year,  _ Ami  _ Adrien de Courfeyrac began streaming gameplay of Among us, a social deduction game. Since then, Among us has become one of the hottest topics online, with streams and compilations of gameplay racking up millions of views. And if there’s one star who’s emerged from the Among Us craze, it’s R. 

“Boss is a real OG on YouTube, he’s been around, he knows everyone. All his friends are YouTube legends, by virtue of him being so f*cking old. He’s bald and everything. When he’s playing a multiplayer game, he’s playing with big names. They needed a fill for Among Us with  _ Les Amis _ , Lègle invited me - that’s 9 huge streams and a plethora of compilations I’m suddenly featured on.”

And why did he become so popular once he was on people’s screens? 

“My audience will try to feed me all sorts of bullsh*t, of course. All sorts of garbage about my art or my commentary or my stupid Camus videos. I know my audience - not a lot of overlap with Valorant streamers. My content is completely irrelevant. The secret to success?” He leans towards me conspiratorially, “People like the sound of my voice.” 

He’s practically whispering in my ear, and I feel it in my bones. This voice got him 4 million subscribers in a matter of months by his own estimation. If you haven’t heard it yet, I recommend you look him up - it’s hard to describe just how pleasant it is.

Personally, I think his voice is only one part of it. His snarky comments and nonchalant, often trolling play style has made every lobby more entertaining. Fans have revelled in his astounding impostor plays, his juvenile ghost chats, his adorable bromance with Marius Pontmercy (baron), the lovingly antagonistic dynamic he has with Éponine Thenardier (j0ndrettegirl), his protectiveness of Cosette Fauchelevent (larkette) - there’s so much more to enjoy than just his voice, lovely as it may be. 

R sketches as we talk. The sight of his hands flying sure and smooth over the page is familiar, and it’s inexplicably comforting to me that the mannerisms I’ve seen in his videos seem unmanufactured in real life. There’s the chipped nail polish, the scar on his left hand, the strange way he holds his pencil. But now there’s more - R slouches and he spins the pencil between his fingers when he pauses. He bounces his knee, but seems to consciously stop when he notices. Now that I’m looking closely, his casual posture seems at least a little affected. There’s a tenseness under his skin that he’s trying very hard to mask. 

R glances up from his sketch when I start asking my next question, and I can’t decide whether that quirk of his lips is amused or mocking. 

“Enjolras is just very competitive. There’s no bad blood between us. In fact, I admire and respect him a great deal. He’s a god among us.”

He says nothing else on the matter. Sorry, fangirls. I tried. 

Apart from the people, I ask how his life has changed since his exponential rise to fame. R is a loquacious man, but he doesn’t equivocate now. The money from his newfound success has saved his life. He can finally afford to go to therapy regularly, and he’s on medication for the first time in seven years. But he also feels more pressure and anxiety than ever.

“Before I blew up this year, I was already wearing masks whenever I went out. Now, I barely go out at all. Someone recognised my voice at a drive through the other day and I flipped the f*ck out, haven’t left the house in four days. I quit boxing and dance. I am wholly and constantly consumed with terror at my own existence.”

As I leave, I notice that there are no mirrors or photos of R that I can see. I don’t spot any pieces of his art either. His loving clutter reflects who he is in a different way, but it’s an interesting parallel to his online career. Somehow, R is willing to share both everything and nothing of himself.

He gives me the sketch he was doing. It’s me, looking down at my little notepad, frowning ever so slightly. My mother calls this my thinking face, and she swears up and down I had it on when I was born. The sketch is framed in her house. 

Walking out the door, I make a joke about his dragon-phone story, and he laughs. I have a long and insightful interview sitting in my audio recorder, but that seems inconsequential right now. I’ve made him laugh, and that’s what makes me feel like I’ve done good work today.


End file.
